Hi all,
I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.
I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?
The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.
Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).
According to a ProtonDB user the specific crashes I am referring to have been finally fixed with 545.29.02. So two weeks ago for a 5 years old card. Good job Nvidia!
I would have loved having that earlier, because I threw mine out after all the frustration with Nvidia and I still doubt that it is fully working now.
Don’t get me wrong it’s great for others stuck with Nvidia hardware though. I would never ever recommend buying any Nvidia hardware for Linux though. The experience is miserable compared to AMD.
Guess I got lucky then. So far so good for me, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed, just in case.